EVENTS

Malaise shown: Call it anything but a hate crime

An eighteen year old boy named T. Nhaveen has been declared dead, five days after a brutal assault and rape by five attackers.

Predictably, the corporate media both in Asia, North America and elsewhere are describing and portaying this story as “bullying”, not violence against someone suspected of being gay. Nhaveen had repeatedly been harassed and assaulted by many people because he was not physically large nor exhibited toxic masculinity as his murderers did. It’s as if the media consider anally raping Nhaveen with inanimate objects to be unrelated to the crime, to not be a crime at all.

Nhaveen’s mother, D. Shanti, was quoted by The Star newspaper as saying that her son had been bullied by one of the suspects in school three years ago but kept quiet to avoid more assaults.

“My son said that boy told him, ‘You are a pondan (transsexual) and I have to make you a man,'” Shanti told The Star.

What’s also not being mentioned is the Malaysian government’s culpability for this assault. On June 3, the government issued a call for “ways to prevent homosexuality. And in February 2017, the government openly advocated torture and abuse of LGBTQIA people under the fiction of “reparative therapy”.